“I don’t know, sir,” the old man whined. “There were not many of us left in the town. Maybe three or four inside, still, if they’re still alive. Please, let them come out if they are. The building is on fire.”
“How many soldiers were in there?” When the old man shrugged, the sergeant leaned into his face and yelled “How many Nazi soldiers?”
“Th-there were ten this morning. I saw two die when you started shooting, another when the doors collapsed. There were some upstairs, too, but I don’t know how many are still alive.”
The sergeant nodded to a corporal, who gathered a group of men. An odalenye, 11 men, ran across the square and flattened themselves against the wall of the station. The corporal looked in quickly, pulled back, waited a beat. Nothing happened. He nodded at the men with him and then jumped over the wreckage on the ground into the station. Maurice heard a gunshot. The other men followed him in, shouting “Red Army!”
Young Olesh rose from his crouching position beside Maurice and stretched his long legs. “Get down, you idiot,” Maurice said. “Are you trying to get shot?” Olesh crouched down again, looking afraid, but nothing happened.
They waited. Olesh panted, and Old Stepan lay on his stomach, bent around the corner of a building, watching the train station, a long low building that had once been yellow. After a while, the corporal came out of the station building, pushing a uniformed middle-aged man ahead of him. The man’s head was bleeding and he stumbled and limped as the corporal pushed him to the square, where Captain Baranov met him. “This is the station master, comrade captain,” the corporal said. “I found him hiding under his desk.”
“Name?”
“Kork,” the man said. His voice was hoarse and cracked, and his chin trembled.
“A German,” the corporal said. He raised his rifle to the station master’s head.
“Nein, nein,” the station master whined. “I am unarmed. I surrender.”
“You are a combatant,” Captain Baranov said. “Consider yourself a prisoner of war.” He turned to Lieutenant Vasilyev. “Lieutenant, you and your men will be responsible for the prisoners until the NKVD arrive.”
“Yes, comrade captain,” Vasilyev replied. “Men, come with me.”
Maurice stood and aimed his rifle at the prisoners against the wall. Stepan and Olesh copied him. Corporal Shewchuk and Sergeant Nikolaev began to search them, patting them down. Shewchuck was enjoying patting the woman’s body. She cried quietly, tears washing streaks in the ash and soot on her cheeks. When Shewchuk squeezed her breasts, she whimpered.
Nikolayev looked up from where he was checking the pants-legs of the station master. “Hands off the women, corporal. Orders.”
“Come on, sarge. Just a little fun here.”
Nikolaev stood and hit Shewchuk on the back of the head with his rifle. “You heard the orders, corporal. Hands off the women. Do that again and I’ll shoot you.” He turned to the other men. “Any of you get any ideas about the women in this country and you’ll get the same thing. This is war, not fun and games.”
The sounds of fighting died away. Another odalenye went into the station and came out. “It’s clear. We found six dead Germans, and there’s probably more bodies under the rubble,” he reported to the captain. “There are several wrecked wagons in the rail yard on the other side, but nothing serviceable.”
An hour later, a colonel arrived with a company of NKVD guards. He organized a parade to the town square, and led the company that escorted the German prisoners, followed by the shock army troops that had overrun the Germans, and then the second-echelon troops.
Maurice and his odalenye were assigned to patrolling the parade’s path and checking the buildings and the side streets for any stray German soldiers left behind, as well as local partisans who opposed the USSR. “Check every window, especially on the second floor,” Sergeant Nikolaev warned.
They did not find any partisans, but rounding a corner into a side street off the main square, Maurice and Mykhailo saw three men running out of the ruins of a shop, arms overflowing with cans of food. “Halt!” they called in Russian, then in German.
The men took off down the street. Mykhailo ran after them, and after a second’s hesitation, Maurice followed. Desperate, the looters ran like deer until one tripped over rubble on the street and sprawled. Cans bounced and rolled, some spilling open. The man called after his comrades, but they disappeared into the growing gloom.
Mykhailo reached him first and pointed his rifle at his head. Maurice reached him a second later. “Don’t shoot him,” he said.
“We’re supposed to shoot looters,” Mykhailo said, squinting down his rifle barrel at the Estonian man, who had risen to his knees and was shaking.
Maurice pushed Mykhailo’s rifle away. “You heard him. Our orders are to shoot anyone we catch looting. Tell everyone you know that the Red Army is here. That means order. And the next time we see anyone taking anything that doesn’t belong to them, we will shoot. Understood?”
The man nodded and stood. As he turned to follow his friends, Mykhailo gave him a solid kick to the rear end. “Don’t forget it!” The man stumbled and nearly fell again, but then ran as fast as he could around the first corner.
“It’s a good thing the sergeant isn’t here,” said Mykhailo.
“Come on, let’s get back to the parade,” Maurice answered.
That evening, the Red Army set up a camp in a farmer’s field just outside the town, along the banks of a creek. Maurice sat by a small fire to warm his hands. Next to him, Evhen Marchuk, who had been a law student in Kalush before he was drafted, was beginning to shake. “Cold?” Maurice asked.
“N-no,” Evhen answered. “It’s just… the fighting, you know? So many close calls today. That inn by the road, the soldiers in the train station. We could have been killed so many times.” His shoulders convulsed and his whole body shivered before he could control himself.
“Better get used to it,” said Taras, sitting across the fire from him. “There’s a long war ahead.”
Maurice thought of the fighting three years earlier, when he had been an officer in the Red Army’s retreat from the blitzkrieg of Operation Barbarossa. He was trying to think of something to say to comfort Evhen a little, when he was startled to see Lieutenant Vasilyev standing by the fire.
The senior officers had taken beds in the few houses that still stood, but Lieutenant Vasilyev had come to his men in the night. “Keep the fires small,” he said. “The countryside is full of partisans. They call themselves the Forest Brothers and they’re viciously anti-communist.” The men did not say anything until the lieutenant pulled a bottle of Russian brandy from inside his coat. “You men did well today. No, you performed perfectly. I have to say I’m very proud. Now, let’s all share a little brandy. Don’t get drunk, mind you. We’re probably going to be fighting again tomorrow.”
And they passed the bottle from man to man. With twelve thirsty mouths, the bottle was soon empty.
That was a much better way to calm Evhen than anything I could have said.
Maurice and the truck
Latvia, October 1944
Maurice paused long enough to push mud off his boot with his rifle butt. The felt upper part of the boot was still filthy, but at least with its leather lower part clean, the boot was lighter.
“Keep up, Bury,” Sergeant Nikolaev growled, and Maurice moved a little faster to catch up to his place in line. He felt as if the troop had been chasing the Germans across half of Latvia, but the continuous drizzle prevented anyone from seeing more than a hundred metres ahead. The boys had griped about the rain most of the morning, and then settled into a sullen funk that sank steadily through the day. The men only grumbled when it was their turn to pull the Maxim.